John Goldfarb, Please Come Home

  “He could get out of the cart and creep up with no warning.”

  “He could wear sneakers.”

  She suddenly hugged his face tight against her own with a soft little cry like journey’s end. “Oh you—nut!”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  THE HUSH of new day settled like a mantle of burnished gold over the Notre Dame campus. A lark zoomed across green swards, piercing the stillness with officious cries of “Wakey-wakey!” and late-sleeping birds twittered angrily at his passing, rustling the branches of trees. Milk cans clattered thinly in some kitchen far away.

  From the doorway of his residence, the Reverend Father Theodore Hesburgh inhaled the muted sounds, winding his watch and meditating as his breath thickened into fog in the morning cold. Then he tightened the belt of his cassock, closed the door behind him, and stepped lightly onto the path leading to the main administration building.

  The path wound into a wooded lane, and the Notre Dame president whistled cheerily through the shadows, his hands balled into warm fists in the pockets of his black peacoat. “Cheer, cheer for old Notre——”

  The priest froze in his footsteps. Miles Whitepaper had stepped silently from behind a large oak, confronting him wordlessly like the seedy wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. His Homburg dented, his face gray with the rough stubble of beard, he gripped a portfolio in a thorn-scratched hand. “Father Hesburgh,” he intoned grimly: “our country—right or wrong!”

  Father Hesburgh eyed him coolly and pondered the feasibility of running in his frock.

  * * *

  “Good morning, John,” purred Jenny Ericson in their king-sized bed. “Isn’t it a wonderful morning!”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  IBN CALIBAN crouched in shadows. He clutched the telephone with difficulty, for long usage had contorted his hand into a perfect sheath for a knife. It ached for cold steel and was good for little else except as a receptacle for long-stemmed roses.

  “But he doesn’t look Jewish,” the spy whispered into the mouthpiece.

  “Nor do you look like a cow’s udder,” rasped the voice of the Imam through the receiver. The point of this thrust was not quite clear to Ibn Caliban, but he prudently chose not to make an issue of it.

  “That’s true,” he said simply.

  “Now tell me that his name is Epstein and you shall die horribly,” threatened the Imam.

  “Now there, I’m glad you brought that up,” whispered Ibn Caliban. “I mean, that’s the thing: his name is Agajanian.”

  “German?” ruminated the Imam.

  “I don’t think so,” said Ibn Caliban quietly.

  “What do you think, donkey?”

  “Fawz has a football team; he wants to play Notre Dame.”

  There followed a long pause, and then a crackling sibilance from the other end: “Ibn Caliban—what do you think of giant ants?”

  “Your Imamship, it is true! On my blade, I swear it!”

  “Hm-hm.”

  “Now don’t kid!” yipped the spy.

  “A football team,” said the Imam flatly.

  “Yes!” husked Ibn Caliban.

  “And that’s all there is to it.”

  “All!”

  The Imam considered. “Very well,” he said at last. “Come home.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve made the varsity.”

  Ibn Caliban shifted uneasily; there was nothing audible from the other end of the line but the sound of heavy breathing.

  “I will give you five seconds, retroactively, in which to amend that statement.”

  Ibn Caliban’s mind whirled spin-dizzy. One … Two … “What I meant, Your Imamship, is that something else may be afoot here. I should stay to cover.”

  “And I will cover your grave with old mosque shoes.”

  “Someone new has arrived!”

  “Eh?”

  “From Washington!”

  “Ahhhhh!”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he look Jewish?”

  “No, but then I don’t look like a cow’s udder.”

  The Imam wasn’t positive that it was insolence. “His name?” he rasped.

  “Yookoomian.”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  “THEY’VE BEEN scheduled?!” shrieked Goldfarb, clutching Jenny to his bosom in the shadow of the sphinx. He turned green, under the circumstances an unfortunate choice of color.

  The King grinned over the hood of his golf cart. “Sure, skedool! Gung to kill dem!”

  “Kill them?” raved the U-2 pilot. “I’ll kill myself!”

  “Shurrup!” rapped the King harshly, upset by talk of defeatism. “No got soocide kat!”

  “But——”

  “You best coach in whole dem world! Arab best player! Good, better, best!” He flipped on his transistor. “You make bad trick—you lose—you go party-party Moscow!” And he showered away.

  Goldfarb stared after him mutely, the fast-fading strains of “Moon over Miami” hollow in his ear. Then he slumped to the ground and his back fell against the paw of the sphinx. “Party-party Moscow!” he intoned numbly.

  “Good grief Charley Brown!” murmured Jenny, in a daze. She set herself down slowly beside Goldfarb, and they both stared vacantly at their Bedouin guards, who were now gamboling merrily in bright sunlight. One of them spurred his horse after a low-flying eagle and caught it on the wing, setting it to outraged, humiliated screaming. It had merely wanted to say something inspirational to Goldfarb.

  The U-2 pilot’s eye flickered with sudden interest.

  * * *

  Fawz rounded a corner in the palace and then slowed to a halt. Before him were Ammud and Ashley, arm in arm, strolling.

  “Papa!” Ammud greeted him excitedly. “Look! Buddy-buddy from school. Eshley Yookoomian!”

  “Too dem many Armenian here,” rumbled Fawz, who had acquired an intense dislike for college boys. Moreover, Ashley’s pet monkey had gotten loose in the throne room and made a shambles of his new train set.

  “Gung to help fix Fawz U. nice-nice!” beamed Ammud.

  “Right,” leaped in Ashley, seeing that it was not going well. “In fact, we’ve hatched some pretty big plans already, like this Alumni Day celebration we were just discussing—and course-wise, Ammud agrees with me that it might be sort of forward-looking to head up a new department, Comparative Religions. We could build a chapel and—— Say, listen—I don’t think Schweitzer’s busy.”

  “Got room?” pounced Fawz irrelevantly.

  “Yes, thanks, Your Majesty.”

  “Got woman?”

  “Sir?” Ashley’s blood pounded: wham-bam, Scheherazade! He couldn’t believe his good fortune.

  “Hah!” grinned Fawz. “Papa fix!” And without further formality he burst off toward the harem in a cloud of steaming mischief.

  Ammud and Ashley stood there for a while, earnestly exploring the propriety of hazing in a college of Koranic studies; and then, finding themselves mutually befuddled, they parted.

  Ashley gleeped through the halls toward his room, his veins aflame with carnal expectation. Surely there wouldn’t be any harm before dinner, he was thinking and, rounding a corner, came upon Goldfarb walking toward him, his kaffiyeh pulled up to his eyes. They both froze in tableau.

  “Me friend,” said Ashley, raising his right arm.

  “Farooba,” grunted Goldfarb, and swished past him. Ashley made a pious resolve to learn more about the language and, scratching his head, walked on eagerly, unaware of the silent shadow stalking him, or of the even greater horror awaiting him in his room, where Miss Beaver sat facing the door on the edge of a chair, clearing her throat.…

  * * *

  Goldfarb found Fawz in the throne room, grappling with a hula-hoop. “Your Majesty,” called the U-2 pilot, approaching him, and the King, startled, let slip the hoop. “Spik English!” rumbled Fawz, turning a baleful eye on his coach. It was a warning, not a commentary.

 
Goldfarb came up close. “Beating Notre Dame—it means much to you?”

  “Plenty. Gung to kill dem!”

  “Uh-huh,” grunted Goldfarb, leaning over and retrieving the hoop.

  “Not easy,” grunted the King, taking the hoop.

  “True, Notre Dame’s the toughest.”

  “Not Irish, you cuckoo! Hoopa-hoop!”

  “Oh,” uttered Goldfarb, and the King interpreted his intonation as a challenge. He shoved the hula-hoop at Goldfarb. “Hokay, smart airplane guy,” he sneered, “can do?”

  “No.”

  Mollified, the King relaxed. “What il hell you want? Got woman, got foos; what else?”

  Goldfarb inclined his head provocatively. “Wouldn’t you like to double your chances of beating Notre Dame?”

  The King’s eye narrowed. “Stop talk like Arab; say what mean!”

  “First you’ve got to promise something.”

  “I promise, you promise, he promise! Spik!”

  “First, if we win you destroy the U-2.”

  “Absolute!”

  “And when I leave, I take my harem favorite with me.”

  Fawz rapped Goldfarb sharply across the skull with the hula-hoop. “Na!”

  “Then I won’t tell,” declared Goldfarb, folding his arms.

  The King leaped into his golf cart and began wheeling around the room in a snit of indecision. “Na, na, na!” he rorfled as he droned.

  Goldfarb eyed him as he circled surrealistically.

  “We’ll never win,” threatened the pilot.

  “Shaaa! Poo-poo-poo!” rejoined Fawz.

  “You’re taking a very cavalier attitude.”

  “Irish cannot beat Arab!” roared the King suddenly, and zoomed in at Goldfarb in a throne-room game of “chicken.” The pilot, arms still folded, stood his ground, staring the King down, and the cart screeched to a halt inches in front of him.

  “Would you like me to show you what you’re up against?” smiled Goldfarb confidently.

  The King inched forward and deliberately knocked him down.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  IN A darkened briefing room of the Central Intelligence Agency a color slide projection bounced weak, ghastly light onto the upturned faces of the National Security Council’s foremost members. On the dais, tapping the screen with a wooden pointer, stood Heinous Overreach.

  “This photo was taken from a Strife magazine layout on the Fawzi Arabian football team,” narrated the CIA chief. The photo revealed Arabs in football gear running plays. In the left foreground stood a man in blue robes and Arab kaffiyeh; and across the chest of the robe, emblazoned in Arabic and English, were the letters C-O-A-C-H.

  “Notice the coach,” advised Overreach.

  “Who is he?” floated the voice of the President from out of the darkness.

  “Well, according to the caption his name is Griswold Love,” answered Overreach.

  “I see.”

  “But he isn’t Griswold Love at all.”

  “Well, if this isn’t Love, who is it?” snapped the President irritably. Only he could have gotten away with it.

  “The next slide may tell us,” replied Overreach tonelessly.

  Snik-snik, whispered the projector as a new slide clicked into place. “Now study this mug shot of the missing U-2 pilot,” Overreach instructed. Snik-snik. “Now back to the first photo: a blow-up, this time, of the coach’s head.”

  No one stirred.

  “Thought-provoking, isn’t it?”

  Overreach thought he detected a murmur from one of the indistinct faces below him, and he peered down into the darkness. “Somebody say something about a debate?” There was no response and he turned back to the screen. Snik-snik. The pointer flew up. “Now, this photo of King Fawz endeavoring to catch a forward pass in front of this sphinx is from the same layout. It contains one or two——”

  “Could you adjust the focus a little?” interrupted the Vice-President.

  “I can see fine,” spoke up Deems Sarajevo.

  “You’ve got strange eyes,” snapped the Vice-President. “Now let’s turn it just a——”

  “Leave the focus alone!” roared the President of the United States. There was instant hush. “Go ahead, Heinous.”

  Overreach turned back to the screen. “Now then, this photo exhibits one or two puzzling discrepancies.”

  “That means there’s something wrong with it,” whispered Sarajevo in the Vice-President’s ear. The Vice-President turned and glared.

  “These discrepancies,” Overreach was saying, “may well provide a clue to the location of the missing U-2 plane.” He paused momentously. Then he continued: “Observe, first of all, that to the best of our knowledge, the sphinx, as a cultural symbol, has never been indigenous to Fawzi Arabia. And then secondly, if you’ll study the photo carefully, you’ll notice that the forelegs of this sphinx, rather than resting directly forward of its chest, as is customary, are…”

  He did not complete the statement, and instead tapped his pointer at the sphinx’s forelegs; they were spread-eagled sideways from its body at ninety-degree angles.

  “Oh, shit!” breathed the Vice-President.

  * * *

  Except for the flickering beams flaring outward from the projector, the throne room was plunged in blackness. Fawz was screening current Notre Dame game films.

  The King gaped open-mouthed as the undefeated green horde crushed, trampled, flashed and bulldozed; inside, outside, up and over. At one point the camera zoomed in for a close shot of the backfield, hunched in formation. The fullback, who had no neck, leered horribly into the lens, and the screen seemed to pulse and swell nightmarishly with cruel and wanton forces irresistible beyond measure.

  “Oy vay!” gasped Fawz, for he was King and could say anything.

  When the lights went on, the one-eyed ancient glared fiercely at Guz. “We muss buy dem!” he hissed.

  “They can’t be bought,” said Goldfarb.

  The King cackled hysterically and then abruptly sobered. “True?” He blinked at Guz.

  “True,” nodded his aide.

  The King sibbed in Chaldean and several other dead languages and a cloud of gray gas enveloped his golf cart. At last he fixed Goldfarb with a frimmled stare: “Hokay, crookit pilot! Spik!”

  * * *

  Jenny pulled the covers up to her neck and examined the mosaics on the ceiling. She was discovering new nuances. “Do you think it’ll work?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Your idea.”

  “No,” said Goldfarb.

  She sat up abruptly. “Goldfarb—let’s get the hell out of here!”

  “How?”

  “Make a run for it!”

  “You crazy? We’d get killed!”

  “Hah! Fawz wants us both alive!”

  “Forget it, will you!” He rolled over irritably.

  Jenny stared at his back. “You know something?” she said slowly. “I think you want to play Notre Dame!”

  Goldfarb didn’t answer.

  Ashley stood by the door. “Basically, then, you don’t accept my claims.”

  Miss Beaver stood firm. “It is written,” she began and Ashley thrust her out into the hall, slamming the door, and yearned for the comforting, periwigged sight of Thomas Jefferson.

  Strong hands seized him.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  BEDOUINS IN football uniform knocked sawdust from bursting tackling dummies with the incredible power and velocity of their lunges, while in an end zone, Goldfarb indoctrinated eight of the King’s forty-odd sons.

  “I guess you’re wondering why your father interrupted your studies in the States and brought you back here. And that’s all right, because sometimes it’s good to wonder.…” Goldfarb was wondering too; wondering if it had a chance. The Bedouins had brute strength and he would use them on the line; but he needed brains in the backfield, some savvy of the game, the wit to comprehend and execute the complicated plays he planned to devi
se. He hoped princes would do. And maybe that crafty eunuch. “Now all of you have played football before, and——”

  “Goldfarb!”

  The U-2 pilot froze. Goldfarb? Who knew? Yookoomian? He’d been missing for days. Had he finally turned up?

  “Goldfarb!”

  Was he skittery or was that a Russian accent? Goldfarb scanned the field. There! A figure bearing down on him slowly, deliberately. Goldfarb moved away rapidly, toward a group of Bedouins running plays near the far end zone. He looked over his shoulder. The figure was gaining on him.

  Goldfarb stepped up his pace. Then he began to trot, and as his pursuer broke into a frank run, the Fawz U. coach stole a snap from center away from the outstretched hands of a Bedouin back, charged upfield behind the linemen, and grunted with satisfaction as they ran headlong into the stranger, churning him into the sod. Goldfarb leaped nimbly over the crushed and twisted figure, but it managed to reach up a hand and, screaming “Goldfarb!”, seized the coach’s ankle, twisting him to the ground. The U-2 pilot went for his throat and “Goldfarb, you idiot, I’m your ambassador!” shrieked Subtle Cronkite. “Stop thrashing, dammit, you’re hurting me!”

  From his golf cart along the side lines, Fawz scruted the odd spectacle, but bided his time, until Cronkite irrupted upon him with Goldfarb in tow.

  “This is John Goldfarb!” accused Cronkite, glowering at the King.

  Another fuddy-duddy, thought Fawz. “Nize Joosh guy,” he nodded.

  “He also happens to be an American citizen!” the ambassador thrust firmly. “And while my government sincerely regrets the manner of his arrival in your kingdom, we must insist upon his immediate return to the United States!”

  “Poo-poo-poo!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Da Joosh coach stay till aftair bit lousy Irish! Den go back!”

  Cronkite stared wordlessly. “I see,” he said at last.

  “Except he lose.”

  “Sir?”

  Fawz leaned forward in his cart. “If Noter Dam bit Fawz U., Mistair Goldfarp go to Moscow!”

  Chapter Forty